


Procrustean

by prairiecrow



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Abduction, M/M, Mental Torture, Physical Torture, Vacation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-08-15
Updated: 2011-08-15
Packaged: 2017-10-22 15:53:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/239810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An ordeal at the hands of an alien torturer leaves Garak and Bashir to pick up the pieces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Set in early S3, after "Civil Defense" (3x07).

It was over — finally, interminably, the proud head (still so beautiful in spite of its bruises and abrasions) bowed at last, the body below opened in ways both fascinating and horrible, smeared and streaked with blood that had just ceased to flow. At the end Garak had seen his frantic heart beating beneath a thin caul of membrane in his cloven chest, struggling as his torn muscles struggled, young and strong and capable of enduring so much before it yielded to the inevitable. Procrustes had delivered no final killing wound: the injuries he dealt, while gruesome, were not immediately lethal. Bashir's body, weakened by loss of blood, had been conquered by agony and terror. It wasn't the first time Garak had seen a prisoner die because they couldn't bear the ordeal of torture any longer, but in the past he himself had been the interrogator, or at least a willing observer.

This time he was bound to the wall by an invisible forcefield, naked as Bashir was naked, just as much a prisoner and just as helpless — and nearly overcome by waves of anguish that had nothing to do with a blade flaying the skin from his own body or separating his internal structures with nearly clinical precision. Their captor had told him that if he looked away an agonizer would be activated, multiplying the Starfleet lieutenant's suffering exponentially, and so he had watched it all and ignored Bashir's repeated orders (as if a slip of a youth could command him!) to turn away and spare himself the spectacle of his torture.

He had seen every caressing stroke of the scalpel, every cruel tearing of flesh, every pulse of blood, every straining tendon and every grimace and every burning tear shed. His eidetic memory retained each image with crystal clarity, but did not file the data away with the memories of all the other instances of torture he'd witnessed in his nearly six decades of existence. This was in a different category altogether. This breached every defence and shattered every illusion of separation between agent and victim.

How many people had Garak done to death in a similar fashion? Fifty-two, most of them enemies of Cardassia who'd deserved every iota of misery he'd inflicted. Three of them had been little more than children. Twelve of them had been of an age with his Human friend. He'd performed his duty flawlessly in each case.

Fifty-two lives, extinguished with elegant brutality — and not a single one of them, or the aggregate of their significance, could compare with the magnitude of this particular instance: a young Human crying out the last hour of his life under an inexorable stranger's hands, blameless of any wrongdoing whatsoever.

Bashir's only crime seemed to be being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Garak could think of no man alive who was less deserving of such treatment. Even if he hadn't loved the boy, surely he would have mourned the loss of true goodness and innocence and compassion. Even mere friendship (had it ever been "mere" in this case?) would have commanded that much from him. Surely so.

When this ordeal had begun he had demanded to know what their captor wanted, hoping to forestall the promise of the various painful-looking devices arrayed along one wall of the white-walled chamber they were enclosed in, and Procrustes had smiled a smile as broad as his sharp-boned face, turned his gaze on Bashir, and replied: "It doesn't matter, Elim. I'm still going to take your pretty love to pieces in front of you."

It had taken a couple of seconds for Bashir's eyes to widen and his breath to catch in his throat. When his gaze flew to Garak's face Garak had ignored him, his attention fixed on the alien who held their lives in his well-manicured hands. There had been no time for questions — and the expression on Bashir's face had suggested that in truth, he didn't want to know the answers. The hour and twenty-two minutes that had followed had been hellish in a variety of ways, but in some respects the memory of the Human's eyes at that moment — amazed, disbelieving, horrified, and something that Garak didn't dare to analyze too closely — was the worst of all of it.

Now the air was thick with the scents of blood and things even less pleasant, while the burly male — Garak had no idea what species he hailed from — smiled almost tenderly and cupped Bashir's chin in one thick-fingered hand, lifting his face to kiss his cheek and lap delicately at the blood that smeared it. Red fury clenched in Garak's stomach, more savage even than the background pulse of rage that had driven every heartbeat during Bashir's torture, but he managed to maintain his enigmatic expression. He had worn it throughout Bashir's valiant struggles to remain silent, through his broken pleading and through his desperate, hopeless screaming; he had listened to the boy spill every pathetic secret he possessed, trying to buy his freedom from the merciless and exquisite torments being carved so artistically into his helpless flesh…

All in vain. Procrustes had seemed completely uninterested in anything to do with Starfleet, or even with the fact that Bashir was genetically augmented, a piece of information that Garak had found most intriguing but ultimately inconsequential in the face of what he was witnessing. All his mental powers had been devoted to trying to figure out a way to manipulate Procrustes into turning those knives and obscenely cunning hands on himself rather than on the good Doctor, but in the end his verbal efforts were as unsuccessful as Bashir's, although of course he was still alive and the Human was at last, mercifully, dead.

When Procrustes released Bashir's head, letting it slump forward, and turned to his right to face Garak with a pleasant expression — one monster greeting another — Garak allowed himself a small bland smile in response.

"Well, Elim," the alien said in a jovial fashion, "what did you think? Was the performance up to your own high standards?"

Garak continued to smile. His teeth ached to rip out that thick throat and tear deeper, all the way down to the spine. He heard the echo of Bashir's final words, as lost as those dark tear-filled eyes fixed on his face:  _Garak… please, I…_ He said nothing. For once in his life he did not trust himself to speak without screaming.

Procrustes saw it all. Of course he did: he was an empath, and in his case Garak's own Cardassian nature and all the elaborate shields he'd spent a lifetime cultivating seemed as effective as a veil of gauze trying to shield a warp core's light. The alien bared more teeth, matching the nature of Garak's subtle snarl, and crossed the two meters separating them in three easy strides. He was still holding the knife he'd used to slice open Bashir's golden skin before tearing it off with his bare hands. It glinted with maddening brilliance in the glare of the overhead lights. The room was small: if he were only able to get free, Garak could easily have painted the walls with the bastard's blood. He held that image close to his heart, like an inestimable treasure, and smiled more widely, not caring if the blue-skinned beast perceived the nature of this particular lust.

Moving in so close that the heat of his clothed body reached Garak's chilled skin, Procrustes reached up with his free hand and laid it on the Cardassian's breastplate, over his heart. Gently he said: "You haven't answered my question."

Anointed with Bashir's blood, Garak found the words at last: "I found your style both terribly affected and distastefully unrefined." He used the Fourth Command Inflection he'd been taught by his Obsidian Order mentors, the one that sounded as soft as velvet but concealed razored blades in each syllable. "Your instructors should really be quite ashamed of themselves. Your technique was absolutely deplorable! Now, in the Order we —"

"— would have kept him alive for days, making him repeat himself until he said what you wanted to hear." Procrustes chuckled and patted Garak's chest almost fondly. "The Order was never particularly interested in truth, was it? Whereas the truth is all that I'm interested in, and the ultimate standard by which all men and women are measured in  _my_  domain." He looked deeply into Garak's unblinking eyes; his mental touch was intangible, but Garak could still fancy that he felt it as a crawling intimate violation. "You," he said quietly, "are a resolute enemy of the truth, aren't you? But you'll tell me in the end. After all," and his pale violet eyes slid sidelong toward the mutilated corpse that hung from the wall like a soiled piece of butchered meat, "you've both already told me so much…"

"You want the truth, do you?" He maintained his caressing tone and felt white heat burn behind every scale on his body. "All right, then. The truth is this: I promised I'd kill you if you laid a finger on him, and that's a promise I'll keep. And believe me, what you did to him will pale in comparison to the tricks you'll have learned by the time  _I'm_  done with you."

Procrustes gazed at him for a heartbeat, then threw back his head in a peal of deep rolling laughter. Garak waited patiently, and when he'd finished the alien regarded him with a gaze full of amusement. "Such bravado!" he said genially. "And such an agile sidestepping of the facts! He called you a pragmatist, didn't he?" 

"Did he?" Garak never missed a beat, although the thought of Bashir's voice went straight to his heart and embedded itself like a silver blade. "I hadn't noticed."

"Elim." Gently chiding now. "You noticed everything about him, although he saw so little of you. And I'm afraid your —"

"Afraid?" Garak drew himself up as best he could with his wrists pressed to the wall at the level of his temples, fixing his tormentor with an imperious glare. He felt no fear himself: his rage and grief were too great, his mind almost entirely consumed with the need for revenge… and the lovely boy had been right — he  _was_  a pragmatist, and at the moment he was entirely focussed on finding and manipulating any possibility of turning this highly uncomfortable situation to his own advantage.

In the next interval of hours, one of two things was going to happen: either he would find some way to escape his bonds and kill this creature, or death would extinguish the images in his mind forever. Most likely the latter, a prospect which he frankly found more promising in one respect: he wouldn't have to face the remaining days of his life with the remembrance of his friend's final whispered plea, the cry for rescue that he'd been helpless to answer. His memory enshrined each second of Bashir's death indelibly; it would be something of a relief to escape that relentless litany of his own failure.

"Afraid?" he repeated. "You're the one who should be afraid. You might be able to read my mind, but you have no idea what — or who — you're dealing with."

"I know the only thing worth knowing," Procrustes murmured, his eyes darkening, all pretence of amiability vanishing. "I know that you're going to be held to the standard of truth, and that you'll be found intolerably wanting." He raised his free hand to Garak's temple, then ran it back over the curve of his head; the forcefield denied Garak the freedom to so much as twitch away from that filthy touch. "I've always thought that Cardassians have beautiful hair," he remarked, his fingers trailing down to examine the ridges running along Garak's jawline from his ear. "And such fascinating scale patterns. Perhaps a trophy is in order. Yes… your scalp, neck ridges and shoulder scutes would look very fine mounted on a form. Shall we start there?"

The blade came up and touched Garak's hairline over his left temple. Pressed. Incised. Eyes still locked with those of the alien, Garak barely felt the thread of pain or the first drops of blood tracing down over his skin. Everything seemed dim and distant but the fury that made him capable of functioning. Everything was —

"He loved you," Procrustes whispered, his smile returning with a vengeance. That attack cut deeper than any scalpel ever could. "And he didn't realize it until the very end. You're right: he  _was_  quite the fool, wasn't he?"

Three different retorts crowded into Garak's throat. He opened his mouth not knowing which one was going to emerge victorious.

At that instant the lights went out — and Garak felt the invisible restraints holding him in place fall away.

Without thinking, he acted.


	2. Chapter 2

They were a little over an hour into their trip back from Risa in the  _Ganges_  when Bashir, sitting at the port pilot console, looked up from his cup of tea and smiled, an expression that managed to be wry and fond at the same time. "So you're not going to tell me?"

Garak, seated at the starboard console and just in the process of composing himself for a quick nap, opened his eyes and wagged an admonishing forefinger at his companion. "Ah, ah! Don't you think that I owe the Commander my discretion, at least? He sent me on this marvellous trip, after all."

Deep Space Nine's CMO's look turned exasperated. "I'm senior staff, Garak. I think I can be trusted with the information."

"I'm very sorry, Doctor, but I'm at a loss: what 'information', exactly, do you think I was sent to Risa to obtain? The seminar schedule for the conference on Federation/Cardassian comparative sociological studies? A dissertation on how boring Professor Juba could actually be — which, I must admit, rather beggars the imagination?" He shifted his shoulders to find a more comfortable position, closing his eyes again, then briefly opened one to fix Bashir with a stern look. "And besides, even if I  _had_  intercepted military secrets from an…" A wave of his left hand. "…undercover informant, a promise is a promise. You wouldn't want me to betray your commanding officer's trust, would you?"

A thoughtful twist of that full-lipped mouth. "No. I suppose not." The twist quirked perilously close to another smile as he swung his chair round to face his companion. "You're only delaying the inevitable, you know."

"Oh?" Garak infused his voice with sincere curiosity. "And why is that?"

"I know how you operate. You won't tell me now, but we'll be having lunch together in a few days, or few weeks, and you'll start dropping… hints."

"Really!" Garak raised both brow ridges, his eyes still closed. "What an outrageous notion. I will not!"

"And then," Bashir continued as if he hadn't interrupted, "a few more hints, and a few more… you never could resist teasing me with a mystery."

 _There are many things about you that I could never resist,_  Garak thought,  _not least of which is your unfailing value as free entertainment._  "Doctor, once again you're letting your imagination run away with you. I've never been anything but straightforward with you, as you very well know. And besides," he continued, fully warming to the game, "I assure you that I did nothing this week past but enjoy a soft bed, attend seemingly endless lectures, make frequent use of the hotel pool and eat far too many Delavian chocolates."

"Hm." He heard the young Human take a long sip of his tea. Those lips. "Your contact must have spent most of his or her time swimming. I don't think I saw you out of your trunks for more than ten minutes at a time."

"I wore a suit to dinner every night," Garak pointed out.

"True." The smile in his voice turned mischievous. "Do you ever wear anything in between?"

Garak cracked both eyes open to offer a puzzled look. "'In between…'?"

"Swimming trunks and clothing that covers everything but your head and your hands."

A vaguely scandalized glance. "That's a rather personal question, isn't it?"

"I answered every question you asked about about my 'lady friends'."

"Questions that scarcely needed to be posed in the first place. I don't think I ever saw  _you_  without a lovely companion hanging on your arm. I was simply making dinner conversation. What was the name of that charming girl who joined us the third night…?"

"Melana." Bashir's dark eyes turned briefly dreamy, which didn't surprise Garak in the least. The gazes of the Human and the mauve-skinned woman had been resolutely locked throughout the entire meal: watching them smile and coo and  _giggle_  at each other, he'd gotten the distinct feeling that he could have risen from his chair, thrown his dinner plate over the railing into the ocean and walked away without either of them noticing a thing. 

In the present he sighed subliminally. It had been worth the aggravation to see Bashir in the indigo pants and jacket he'd crafted for his slender friend back on Deep Space Nine; the ivory shirt of Andorian silk had done wonders for his golden skin and hazel eyes, and of course there'd been the times he'd spent relaxing beside and swimming in the hotel pool, lithe and bronzed as a young god...

No, Garak decided, he'd gladly trade the silent resentment of seeing Bashir with a parade of women for the spectacle of his beauty out of that hideous Starfleet uniform. And really, resentment was such a useless emotion under the circumstances: it wasn't as if he'd ever had a chance with the Human, who had never evinced the slightest interest in anything that wasn't pretty, youthful and female, none of which criteria a certain Cardassian tailor could fulfill. 

It was true that Bashir's gaze had lingered on Garak's body the first time he'd seen his friend attired for sunning and swimming, but that had been simple medical curiosity: no doubt the Doctor had been making meticulous mental notes on the location of every scale and ridge, and on the sleek shape of the genital sheath that was visibly different from a Human's soft bulge inside the close-fitting black briefs Garak had chosen to wear. Ideally he would have stretched himself out in the blazing sun stark naked without a qualm — going through the Order's training had stripped him of any false modesty, and on Risa most people wouldn't have looked twice at anyone lounging around naked (especially someone with no external genitalia), but… well, he had no inclination to expose himself to Bashir's clinical evaluation and see only professional interest in those observant hazel eyes. He carried quite enough wounds already, thank you, without his ego taking that kind of hit. 

Not that it had been particularly neglected this past week: he'd been propositioned by four women and three men while he took his ease at poolside, all of whom he'd diverted without provoking ill feeling by applying his usual charm and the smile he knew could ease the sting of any refusal. Among his other talents Garak was a consummate diplomat, able to tell someone to go to Hell and make them happy to be on their way. None of his would-be bedmates had been overly obnoxious about it so he'd been able to maintain a pleasant demeanour, although he had been rather startled to glance across the deck after sending one lithe young beauty on her way to see Bashir standing at the bar watching him with clear amusement. The Human had flashed a grin and saluted him with an alarmingly pink beverage, and Garak, returning the smile much more cautiously, had suddenly decided that he'd had enough sun for one afternoon.

That smile! By the nine Hebitian Gods, when had gained the ability to slip into his heart like a silver blade? Heading back toward his room with the eyes of the young lady still following him, Garak had reflected that he couldn't remember a time when Bashir's happiness hadn't made the weight of his exile lighter: even before he'd come to care for the Starfleet officer on a more personal level, the sheer beauty of that unadorned face had never failed to lift his spirits. When his malfunctioning implant had been slowly killing him he had been selfishly pleased to see Bashir walk into his quarters, even uninvited, and he clearly remembered his first thought when he'd realized that Quark had failed him and that suicide was the next logical step:  _My last sight will be of you, my dear Doctor. There are far worse notes to go out on._

But of course Bashir hadn't let him die, the impudent child, and now he was sitting in a runabout on the way back to his official prison and smiling politely as the good Doctor lost himself in silent rapt contemplation of a woman he'd left behind. Garak resisted the impulse to tell Bashir that he sympathized with how hard it must be, being burdened with such good looks and charged with the task of, as the Humans said with their usual poetic flair, "loving them and leaving them". Of course the sarcasm never even made it to his eyes. He might feel the occasional genuinely mean impulse when it came to Bashir's self-absorption — less acute now than it had been when he'd first landed on the station, but the man still had an ego big enough to possess its own gravitational field — and Bashir had gotten much better at weathering sharply worded attacks, but Garak had even less desire to spend the flight home enduring the younger man's offended silence than he'd —

On Bashir's console, a telltale began to blink and the computer emitted a melodious chime before intoning:  _"Incoming transmission, encoded, source unknown."_

Startled out of his reverie, Bashir swung his chair back around and set aside his cup of tea. "That's odd… Computer, identify transmission encoding."

A pause, then a much less musical chirp.  _"Unable to comply."_

Bashir frowned. "Why not?"

 _"Message encoding protocol is not on file."_

Visibly puzzled, Bashir turned toward Garak. "Well, that's odd. Who would —?"

Garak rose from his seat, suddenly not sleepy in the least. "Allow me, would you…?" He crossed to Bashir's console and leaned close to the Doctor's right side. "Computer, display message encoding matrix."

The machine obediently complied, and Garak studied the fluctuating bars and dancing symbols for several seconds. "No, I'm not familiar with it either."

"Should you be?"

"There are Cardassian protocols which would not be in your system, Doctor — or certainly shouldn't be, at any rate. This looks like nothing I've ever seen before."

Bashir glanced upward, the universal gesture of someone communicating with the intelligence that infused modern environments. "Computer, what was the length of the transmission?"

 _"The transmission is ongoing."_

"Put it on audi—"

Garak laid a hand briefly on his upper arm. "I wouldn't do that if I were you."

This time the adorable scowl was directed at him. "Why not? It could be a distress signal, or —"

"— or something far more nefarious."

Bashir shook his head. "Garak, we're in the middle of Federation space. Who would be… doing whatever it is you think they're doing?"

"I have no idea  _what's_  going on — and that makes me naturally cautious." Garak was evaluating the readings with the practiced eye of someone who had been thoroughly versed in the art of scrambling and encrypting streams of data. "Computer, is the source of the transmission still undetected?"

 _"Affirmative."_

He looked Bashir straight in his lovely eyes. "My advice is to continue on our way. If this was any concern of ours the people issuing the message would have made it easy to interpret."

Bashir smiled in disbelief with a  _soupcon_  of condescension. "And I'm the ranking officer on this trip — the only officer, in fact — and  _I_  say we investigate. Computer, play transmission on audio."

Before Garak could do more than open his mouth to protest, the runabout's intelligence obeyed. A low pulsing sound exuded from the walls, hissing and humming, a cross between the breathing of some massive animal and low-grade electrical feedback. Bashir winced, an expression that Garak managed to suppress only as a result of his long training in hiding his true reactions: the vibrations affected him in a way that he was sure Bashir was not experiencing, as the  _risek_  structure in the middle of his forehead, used by his ancient progenitors to detect minute tremors in deep water, picked them up and amplified them. The buzzing settled in the precise center of his skull and seemed to disrupt the very roots of his thoughts; he shook his head in a futile attempt to dislodge the sensation, but to no effect.

"Computer!" Evidently Bashir found it no more pleasant than he did. "Discontinue playback!"

Blessed silence fell, but the sense of fine trembling lingered. Garak closed his eyes for a couple of seconds and drew a deep breath. When he opened them again there was something filling the viewport in front of him.

He blinked, momentarily denying the evidence of his own vision. "Doctor, when did we drop out of warp?"

"I…" Bashir brought the fingertips of his right hand to his temple, looking even more perplexed, and narrowed his eyes at his console before returning them to the other vessel. "I'm not sure, but we  _are_  back in normal space, and at a full stop."

Garak scarcely heard him. He was staring at the shape beyond the tempered windows— long, elegant, sleek as a fish in water, of a grey so dark it was almost black in the pale light of the stars — and trying to make sense of the emotions currently racing through his usually disciplined body.

All Cardassians possessed a natural taste for the hunt, inherited from the river-dwelling piscivorian saurians that had been their evolutionary predecessors: Garak could see no cues about the ship before them that should have tweaked those ancient reflexes, but he nevertheless felt a restless itch thrill under all his scales and the sharpening of the senses that came from a release of adrenaline. Suddenly he wanted to get closer to that vessel looming against the starry void, to engage it in some fashion — it held the promise of…

… of what, exactly? He found himself drawing deeper breaths through his nose, enhancing the flow of any available scents, but all he could smell was the artificial environment around him and the pleasant clean musk of Bashir himself. For once the latter seemed distant and unimportant. Catching movement out of the corner of his eye, he glanced to his left and saw that the Human was inputting commands on his console, ordering the runabout to glide toward that alluring structure ahead. "Doctor?" 

[TO BE CONTINUED…]


End file.
